It is slim relief that Brenda Fitzgerald was forced to resign last week as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her final offense in her very short and immoral tenure was investing in tobacco stocks after being appointed in July, according to a Politico report. Before being appointed by the Trump administration, the former Georgia health commissioner had long invested in cigarette companies whose products kill 480,000 Americans a year and 6 million worldwide, according to her own agency.

She was further compromised by investments in drug, insurance, and health diagnostic firms that posed conflicts in dealing with cancer, opioids, and dissemination of health information. She told the New York Times that she was considering renewing CDC ties with Coca-Cola. In Georgia, she was a cheerleader for Coca-Cola’s physical fitness programs. The world’s largest soda company, based in Atlanta, was exposed in 2015 for funding scientists who said America’s obesity crisis was all about exercise, not the excess empty calories from sugary drinks. As documented by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Coca-Cola was following an all-too-common tactic of the corporate disinformation playbook—hiring scientists to produce results that obscure a product’s harm.

But her departure hardly guarantees that we can count on the CDC to protect the nation’s health. For the moment, the acting director is Anne Schuchat, a respected infectious disease expert, known for leading domestic and global response teams against flu viruses in the US and infectious diseases in Africa and China, including Ebola and SARS. A member of the National Academy of Medicine and a rear admiral in the United States Public Health Service, her disease detective work was the model for a lead character Kate Winslet played in the movie “Contagion.”

The ethical conundrum of Alex Azar

It is rare for acting directors, even if immortalized by actresses, to win a full appointment. So who comes next bears serious watching, especially since Alex Azar is the new secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), the department that oversees the CDC, and he himself is an ethical conundrum.

Azar, a lawyer who clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and was on George W. Bush’s legal team for the 2000 Florida recount, became general counsel at HHS and ultimately deputy secretary of the department. He left in 2007 to become the top lobbyist for the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical giant and worked his way to the presidency of the company in 2012.

When President Trump nominated him in November to replace Tom Price, who abused taxpayer dollars by traveling by private jet, the president tweeted Azar “will be a star for better healthcare and lower drug prices.” When Azar was sworn in on January 29, Trump, who has repeatedly said that drug companies get away with “murder,” said prices would now “come rocketing down.”

From drug company CEO to people’s champion on drug prices? Unlikely.

There is no evidence to remotely suggest that Azar, the first pharmaceutical executive ever to head HHS, according to the Washington Post, will miraculously transform from drug company CEO into the people’s champion on drug prices. In July, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported that in the last 20 years, while the price of milk went up 23 percent, the cost of a Dodge minivan rose 21 percent and general inflation was 32 percent, the price of Lilly’s insulin drugs Humalog and Humulin skyrocketed by 1,157 percent and nearly 800 percent respectively. A vial of Humalog that cost $21 in 1996 cost $274.70 last summer.

Lilly is a defendant along with global diabetes drug titans Novo Nordisk and Sanofi in a class action price-fixing lawsuit filed last year in federal court in Massachusetts. According to the lawsuit, Lilly’s Humulin shot up 325 percent from just 2010 to 2015, a period covering Azar’s first three years at the helm. Several news stories and guest columns last year featured the difficulty many American diabetics have in affording insulin. One out of every eight American adults has diabetes, and the lower the socioeconomic status, the higher the incidence of the disease.

According to the CDC, diabetes was listed as any cause of death on a quarter million US death certificates in 2015, and the annual direct and indirect cost of diabetes to the nation is a quarter billion dollars. Several small studies over the last two decades have shown that high percentages of patients admitted to hospitals with life threatening diabetic ketoacidosis became sick after discontinuing insulin therapy because it was unaffordable.

Lilly blamed the rise in drug prices to other parts of the health care system, but it refused to disclose to the Indianapolis Business Journal its net prices. Lilly ranks 132nd in the Fortune 500 with profits last year of $2.7 billion.

Keeping a watchful eye

Pressed in his Senate confirmation hearings on drug pricing, Azar acknowledged they were high but offered no major solutions, having opposed the Affordable Care Act and saying the government should not have a heavy hand in negotiating drug prices. As average Americans struggle with diabetes drug costs, Azar made $3.6 million in his last year at Lilly in salary and severance. He also sold off $3.4 million in Lilly stock, according to the Associated Press.

Azar’s light hand on out-of control drug prices merits a very watchful eye over both HHS and CDC. We need to make sure that our government officials, especially those making decisions about access to health care, advocacy against diseases, and scientific research aren’t beholden to profitable companies producing drugs, cigarettes, soda, or other health-related products or services. Before her departure, Fitzgerald came under fire when the Washington Post reported that certain words were being banned from budget requests, such as “evidence based” and “diversity.”

Trump says that under Azar, drug prices will come rocketing down. In actuality, the watch is on to see if Azar instead is another incoming missile from Trump against federal protection of the nation’s health.

It does not matter who pulls the semantic shroud over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When it comes to matters of science and health, any level of silence at the CDC is a declaration that saving lives is secondary to politics.

According to a recent Washington Post story, higher-ups banned from budget requests the words: “diversity,” “entitlement,” “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” even “evidence-based,” and “science-based.” CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald claimed that no words were banned, “period.” But at a minimum, multiple sources confirm that meetings were held on how to craft budget requests so as not to trigger opposition from conservatives in Congress.

Evidence-based declines

Whether ordered or voluntary, the evidence of such changes is clear: many of the above words have already been disappearing during President Trump’s first year, according to Science Magazine. Use of the phrases “diversity” and “vulnerable” are down a combined 68 percent compared to President Obama’s last budget. Use of the phrase “evidence-based” is down 70 percent.

That latter fact hardly seems to be a coincidence given a President with a documented casual relationship with the truth who, according to the Washington Post fact-checking department, has made 1,950 false or misleading claims in his first year in the White House.

The declines in the use of this terminology is consistent with other scientific erasures in the first year of Trump. An analysis this fall by National Public Radio found a major drop in the number of grants awarded by the National Science Foundation containing the phrase “climate change.” Only 302 NSF grants contained the phrase last year, compared with the annual average of 630 during the Obama administration—that’s a 52 percent decline.

NPR quoted Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, as saying, “In the scientific community, we’re very cautious people. We tend to be quite averse to notoriety and conflict, so I absolutely have seen self-censorship among my colleagues.”

Real-life consequences

The obvious question of course is whether shying away from diversity and vulnerable populations such as transgender people in budget requests, or shrinking from assuring that studies are evidence-based will result in failures to monitor disparities and effectively protect Americans’ health.

For instance, take the issue of racial health disparities. It would be tragic if the Trump administration allows a reversal of the progress that has come through decades of dedication from the career scientists and medical and public health experts at the CDC and its parent Department of Health and Human Services who have trudged on regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress.

A good example is the case of black men and women between the ages of 45 and 54, one of the most historically vulnerable groups, who have long died from chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke and cancer at far higher rates than the national average.

In 1980, according to CDC data, the death rate for black men and women in that age group was 1,480 per 100,000 people and 768 per 100,000 people, respectively. Both rates stood more than twice as high as those for their white male and white female counterparts (699 per 100,000 and 373 per 100,000, respectively).

Even during the Reagan years, in an administration frequently hostile to civil rights and friendly with apartheid South Africa, then-HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler saw fit to address these yawning racial gaps head on. In a landmark 1985 task force report on “Black and Minority Health,” she wrote that the disparities were an “affront to both our ideals and to the ongoing genius of American medicine.” She said it was time to “decipher the message inherent in that disparity.”

That report called for a dramatic increase in health studies to help devise effective, evidence-based interventions for specific racial groups. Unlike the murky controversy of the moment, the 1985 report’s language made it clear that “diversity” was a critical word. Under a section titled, “Implications of Diversity,” the report said: “This diversity among populations is reflected in language difficulties, in cultural practices and beliefs with respect to illness and health, in differences in their birth rates, in differences in the afflictions which kill them.”

Years of progress, but more work ahead

The efforts during the Reagan years set the stage for dramatic progress, even though there is plenty more work still to do.

The death rate for black men aged 45 to 54 dropped 15 percent in the 1980s during the Republican administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush. It dropped another 19 percent in the 1990s, and 19 percent again in the 2000s, mostly under the two terms of Democrat Bill Clinton and the two terms of Republican George W. Bush. Finally, under the two Democratic terms of Obama, the rate dropped yet another 18 percent.

The result is a current death rate for these black men of 678 per 100,000, less than half the 1980 rate. The death rate for black women in the same age group is down 42 percent from 1980.

The dramatic progress, and the obvious work left to do, is precisely why the Trump administration must not turn its back on these kinds of evidence-based accomplishments—or the forthright use of language that helped achieve them.

Besides, semantic silence has been tried before and has failed.

In one telling episode during George W. Bush’s first term, for example, HHS tried to eliminate the words “inequality” and “disparities” from a national report on health disparities.

A strong early draft had said: “Inequalities in health care that affect some racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographical subpopulations in the United States ultimately affect every American. From a societal perspective, we aspire to equality of opportunities for all our citizens. Persistent disparities in health care are inconsistent with our American values.”

That draft also said, “The personal cost of disparities can lead to significant morbidity, disability, and lost productivity.”

The final report in late 2003 erased the above, replacing it with this far more cheerful message: “The overall health of Americans has improved dramatically over the last century. Just in the last decade, the United States has seen significant reductions in infant mortality, record-high rates of childhood vaccinations, declines in substance abuse, lower death rates from coronary disease, and promising new treatments for cancer.”

The firestorm that erupted over the two versions forced then-HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson to publish the stronger draft online in early 2004. As if to second its importance, a National Academies report that year said “widespread, reliable, and consistent data” by race and ethnicity are “critical to documenting the nature of disparities in health care and developing strategies to eliminate disparities.”

This is no time to stop developing strategies. Remaining disparities are every bit as urgent as when Margaret Heckler’s task force report said that people of color “have not benefitted fully or equitably from the fruits of science or from those systems responsible for translating and using health sciences technology.”

We can see from examples such as these that words can have serious consequences for Americans’ health. After all, you cannot determine what needs to be done without the language to speak about it.

Three weeks ago, North Carolina’s Republican senators, Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, announced their opposition to the nomination of Michael Dourson to run the office of chemical safety in the Environmental Protection Agency. Only one more vote is needed to doom his nomination, assuming unified opposition from all 48 Democrats and Independents.

The question is, who will have the courage to step forward next?

It should take no courage at all, if science and public health matter. Dourson is already in the EPA, serving as an adviser to Administrator Scott Pruitt. But, given Dourson’s outrageous record of working to undermine science-based standards for toxic chemicals on behalf of the chemical industry, he is clearly unfit to lead the office overseeing chemical safety at the federal level.

Belittling the health effects of dangerous chemicals

Dourson’s private research firm has represented companies such as Dow, Monsanto, and PPG Industries, and has had some research funded by Koch Industries.

Michael Dourson helped set a state safety standard for the chemical PFOA 2,000 times less strict than the level deemed safe by the EPA. Photo: pfoaprojectny

He and his firm have routinely judged chemicals to be safe at levels hundreds of times greater than the current standards issued by the EPA. Among those chemicals whose health effects he has tried to belittle is perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), which is used in the manufacture of nonstick cookware such as Teflon and stain-resistant household products such as carpets. Dourson helped the state of West Virginia set a safety standard for the chemical 2,000 times less strict than the level deemed safe by the EPA.

That decision alone threatens the health of many Americans. In 2012, research by scientists at Emory University found workers at a West Virginia DuPont PFOA plant were at roughly three times the risk of dying from mesothelioma or chronic kidney disease as other DuPont workers, and faced similarly elevated risks for kidney cancer and other non-cancer kidney diseases. A more recent study, published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health linked reductions in exposure to PFOA across the country to a sharp decline in pregnancy-related problems including low-birth-weight babies.

In North Carolina, an as-yet-unregulated chemical meant to replace PFOA as a non-sticking agent, Gen X, has already been found at significant levels in the Cape Fear River. And the state is still reeling from nearly 1 million people being exposed to drinking water at Camp Lejeune that was contaminated with chemicals such as benzene, vinyl chloride, and trichloroethylene (TCE) from the 1950s through the 1980s. The Obama administration established a $2.2 billion disability compensation program for Camp Lejeune veterans suffering from cancer.

Serious concerns from North Carolina

Expecially troubling, if confirmed, Dourson would be responsible for oversight of the 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act. In its final months, the Obama administration selected the first 10 chemicals to be reviewed under the new act for their “potential for high hazard.” Of the 10, Dourson has claimed in research that several were safe at levels far exceeding the science-based standards currently established by the EPA. They include solvents linked to cancer such as 1,4 dioxane, 1-Bromopropane, and TCE, the latter of which has been found in the water contamination at Camp Lejeune.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee advanced Dourson’s nomination to the full Senate in late October on a party-line 11-10 vote. But the candidate’s past was too biased for Burr and Tillis, despite the fact that both voted to confirm EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Burr said of Dourson in a statement, “With his record and our state’s history of contamination at Camp Lejeune as well as the current Gen X water issues in Wilmington, I am not confident he is the best choice for our country.”

Tillis’s office seconded that with a statement saying, “Senator Tillis still has serious concerns about his record and cannot support his nomination.”

Issues of great importance in Maine

In the immediate aftermath of Burr’s and Tillis’s rejection of Dourson, it seemed that Maine Senator Susan Collins might quickly follow suit. She said, “I certainly share the concerns that have been raised by Senator Burr and Senator Tillis. I think it’s safe to say that I am leaning against him.”

Collins has said nothing since then. Her office did not respond to repeated requests this week from the Union of Concerned Scientists on her latest position. And Dourson’s nomination stands in limbo, presumably as the Republican leadership worries that they may not have the votes in the full Senate to confirm him. In theory, Collins’ concerns should mirror those of Burr and Tillis because Maine has dealt with its share of water and soil pollution at military bases such as the former Brunswick Naval Station and Loring Air Force Base, both Superfund sites. She has also been active in bipartisan efforts to deal with cross-state air pollution.

Collins was the only Republican to vote against Pruitt’s nomination to run the EPA. Pruitt, who repeatedly sued the EPA on behalf of industry as attorney general of Oklahoma, is aggressively attempting to relax chemical regulations and reverse Obama-era rules such as the Clean Power Plan. The EPA has moved to remove products containing PFOA from being studied for lasting impact in the environment and refused to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, linked to damaging the developing brains of fetuses and young children.

When she announced her opposition to Pruitt, Collins said, “I have significant concerns that Mr. Pruitt has actively opposed and sued EPA on numerous issues that are of great importance to the state of Maine, including mercury controls for coal-fired power plants and efforts to reduce cross-state air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. His actions leave me with considerable doubts about whether his vision for the EPA is consistent with the Agency’s critical mission to protect human health and the environment.”

If Collins truly maintains those concerns, she surely would not want to augment the problems of Pruitt’s already disgraceful tenure by supporting Dourson. But even if she for some reason shies away from a no vote, there are many other Republican senators whose states also have military installations with rampant pollution affecting adjacent communities.

Many more Republican senators should be unnerved

With Camp Lejeune as a haunting example of military pollution of its own soldiers and adjacent communities, the US armed forces are in the midst of investigating potential water contamination at nearly 400 such active and shuttered sites. That fact should unnerve many more Republicans, even those who generally support Pruitt’s actions. According to a Politico report three weeks ago, Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain of Arizona, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Bob Corker of Tennessee were noncommittal about supporting Dourson’s nomination.

Toomey’s office released a statement also reported by the Bucks County Courier Times saying he “remains concerned about the PFOA issue” in towns next to closed military bases in the Philadelphia area, where compounds from firefighting foams may have leached into drinking water sources. Elevated levels of pancreatic cancer have been found in the area.

With so much concern about elevated levels of cancer around the nation linked to water pollution, this is not the time to put someone in charge who made a career out of downplaying the risks of chemicals. It is bad enough that Dourson is already at EPA, advising Pruitt. But that remains a long way from actually having his hand on the pen that can help sign away people’s safety.

Lake Michigan is not yet a hot tub, but the warming of this Great Lake gives you much to sweat about.

In his office at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Paul Roebber, a Distinguished Professor in atmospheric sciences and a former editor of the journal Weather and Forecasting, showed me his most recent climate change lecture slides. The most arresting graphics compare current surface water temperatures of the Great Lakes with those three and a half decades ago. The average summer surface temperatures have risen 8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1980.

Particularly stark was Roebber pointing out a spot where a monitoring buoy floats way out in the middle of 100-mile-wide Lake Michigan, at a latitude between Milwaukee and Chicago. Two decades ago, average mid-July to September surface water temperatures in southern Lake Michigan ranged between 61 and 71 degrees. In 2016, they ranged between 67 and 77 degrees. On three separate days in 2016, temperatures hit 80. Surface water temperature changes near Milwaukee and Chicago were just as remarkable. On August 1, 1992, surface water temperatures were 61 and 65 degrees, respectively. On August 1, 2010, both were in the mid-70s.

“We’re starting to talk bath tub water and that is saying something about the changes,” Roebber said.

The future is almost unthinkable

Roebber’s comments certainly say something to me as a native of Milwaukee. I have vivid memories of childhood winters a half-century ago. We first- and second-graders were so acclimated to consecutive subzero days that when the high was 5 above, we’d walk to school with our coats flying open unzipped.

“We’re starting to talk bath tub water and that is saying something about the changes.” Atmospheric sciences professor Paul Roebber, University of Wisconsin.

Today, scientists predict a future climate unthinkable for a region where Green Bay Packers fans romanticize their home-team advantage in a stadium nicknamed the Frozen Tundra.

Roebber said that the modern lake warming has occurred with a rise of only a single degree in the air temperature over the Great Lakes over the last 30 years. But air temperatures are about to soar in scenarios where little or nothing is done to fight climate change. Researchers all around the Great Lakes and analysts at the Union of Concerned Scientists predict that the average summer highs of Milwaukee, currently about 80 degrees, could rise as high as 92 over this century.

The UCS analysis predicted that by 2100, Milwaukee would have nearly two months’ worth of days 90 degrees or higher, including three weeks’ worth of 100-degree scorchers. There would be at least one heat wave a summer with the sustained oppressive temperatures that killed hundreds of people in Chicago in 1995. Overall air quality would deteriorate as well, exacerbating asthma and other respiratory conditions.

In fact, the Upper Midwest region—including Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis—could collectively experience regular deadly heat waves with temperatures on the same scale that killed an estimated 70,000 people across Europe in 2003. “Under the higher-emissions scenario a heat wave of this magnitude would occur at least every fifth year by mid-century and every other year toward the end of the century,” the UCS analysis concluded.

Under worst-case scenarios, northern Illinois will have the climate of Dallas and southern Illinois will have the temperatures of Houston by the end of this century. As for Illinois’ neighbor to the north, Roebber notes, “Our climate in Wisconsin will look like Arkansas.”

Change is underway in the world’s largest surface freshwater system

It’s scary to contemplate what Lake Michigan could be compared to a century from now. The five Great Lakes comprise the world’s largest surface freshwater system, in a basin serving 30 million people. While many long-range projections of climate change along America’s eastern seaboard focus on chronic inundation from rising ocean levels, the lakes offer a different set of perplexing dilemmas.

Perhaps most perplexing is the year-to-year unpredictability of conditions. The general scenario of recent decades has been less ice cover in winter, which has allowed more water to evaporate and resulted in unprecedented low lake levels. But there can also be years where that trend is punctuated by ice-choked Great Lakes as the warming Arctic ironically creates a wavier jet stream.

The overall long-term trends, according to the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, point to all the bodies of water in the state being at risk.

“Longer, hotter, drier summers and increasing evaporation will result in warmer and shallower rivers, shrinking wetlands, and dried-up streams, flowages and wild rice beds,” the institute says. “Algal blooms will create anoxic conditions for aquatic life in ponds and many lakes.”

“These conditions will reduce the amount of suitable habitat available for trout and other cold-water fishes, amphibians and waterfowl. A two-degree rise in temperature could wipe out half of Wisconsin’s 2,700 trout streams. Hot dry conditions, coupled with more frequent thunderstorms and lightning, will increase the chance of forest fires. Red pine, aspen and spruce trees will disappear from our northern forests.”

A joint report by the University of Wisconsin and the state’s Department of Natural Resources predicts more climate-change losers than winners among fauna. As populations of European starlings, Canada goose, and gray squirrels grow, those of the purple martin, black tern, American marten, common loons, and various species of salamanders, frogs, and prairie birds may decline or disappear.

“This will result in a net loss to the state’s biodiversity and a simplification of our ecological communities,” the report said.

As for commercial activities, Roebber said there may be more ice-free days to allow more winter shipping, but fluctuating lake levels may play havoc with lakeshore-dependent businesses during the rest of the year, from expensive marina dredging operations to beach erosion in resort communities. Water quality may be degraded if low lake levels expose harmful chemicals. An additional wild card is the prospect of Wisconsin facing more weather extremes with heavy rains and floods dancing with more frequent short-term droughts.

“It’s not clear how much lower the lake will go, but the levels will become more variable,” Roebber said.

Sitting on our hands

This month, 13 federal agencies released the government’s latest major assessment that human activities are “the dominant cause” of the warmest period “in the history of modern civilization.” That report predicts a 9.5-degree rise in average temperatures in the Midwest under continued high-emission scenarios, the greatest rise of any region in the contiguous United States.

But it is not clear how much researchers will be able to refine their predictions. The Trump administration, despite approving the release of the congressionally mandated report, is in the midst of an unprecedented attack on climate change research. Climate change experts in the Interior Department have been reassigned. The Environmental Protection Agency has banned some scientists from speaking at climate change conferences. The Trump administration has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts to NASA and NOAA planetary and weather research that relates to climate change.

The assault is also at the state level. Last year, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker ordered state agencies not to comply with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and his DNR removed references from its website saying human activities are the root cause. Despite its prior partnering with university researchers, the DNR currently says, “The earth is going through a change. The reasons for this change at this particular time in the earth’s long history are being debated and researched by academic entities outside the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.”

In this environment, exacerbated by years of prior Congressional budget cuts that constrict the chances of winning federal research grants, Roebber fears for the further erosion of the nation’s ability to protect lives and livelihoods with science.

Destructive weather events are virtually certain to increase. A report this fall by the Universal Ecological Fund calculates that weather events that currently cost the US $240 billion a year will increase to $360 billion annually over the next decade, the latter cost being equal to 55 percent of the current growth of the US economy.

“Facts used to be something we used to solve difficult things and innovate,” Roebber said. “Why the political process is now so destructive to such an important function of society and why the (political) climate has almost become antagonistic toward education is troubling. We’re sitting on our hands instead of accelerating the things we need to do.”

The front pages of last Sunday’s Washington Post and New York Times starkly exposed how concerned citizens, fearful immigrants, and career scientists alike are smothered by the Trump administration’s macabre environmental policies.

Worming through the EPA

The Times zeroed in on Nancy Beck’s voracious worming through the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations of dangerous chemicals and poisons. She is figuratively trying to eat enough holes in the rules to make chemicals harder to track and control and therefore shielding polluters from prosecution.

Beck is the former regulatory science policy director of the American Chemistry Council and was appointed by President Trump in May as deputy assistant secretary in the EPA’s department of Chemical Safety and Pollution Protection. Before the American Chemistry Council, she served in the George W. Bush White House, where she badgered the EPA in such a picayune manner for proof of chemical harms that she was criticized by the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences.

During President Obama’s tenure, Beck performed the same function for the nation’s leading chemical lobbyist, questioning regulation on arsenic and other chemicals used in perfumes and dry cleaning. But Trump’s election turned the world upside down. Beck was brought back by his White House under special provisions that exempted her from ethics rules that would have prevented her from being involved in decisions involving former employers.

She has since wasted no time declaring herself a puppet of industry instead of a searchlight for safety.

Weakened rules on a kidney cancer-causing chemical and other harmful toxins

The Times highlighted Beck’s heavy hand in weakening rules on perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a kidney cancer-causing agent that many large companies, including BASF, 3M, and DuPont, volunteered to phase out during the Obama administration. PFOA is present in such common items as nonstick kitchenware and stain-resistant carpeting.

But even with a total phase out, that chemical remains in millions of cabinets and on millions of floors around the nation. Beck’s rewriting of rules made it seem that the EPA would no longer make risk assessments on “legacy” use of products containing PFOA or their storage or disposal. That so alarmed staffers at the EPA’s Office of Water that they wrote a memo, obtained by the Times, warning that PFOA’s potential to continue to pollute drinking water and ground water remains so strong that it “is an excellent example of why it is important to evaluate all conditions of use of the chemical.”

PFOA is only one of several chemicals that the Trump administration and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, with Beck as a relatively little-known henchwoman, are limiting scrutiny on to protect industry. Before Beck arrived, the Trump EPA had already refused—over the objection of staff scientists—to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide believed to stunt child development. The agency, as the Times reports, is also re-considering proposed bans of methylene chloride in paint strippers and trichloroethylene, which respectively are used in paint strippers and dry cleaning and are linked to illness and death.

A relentless assault

This relentless assault is remaking the EPA into the Everyday Pollution Agency and has reached such a pitch under President Trump that Beck’s immediate boss, Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, left the agency last month after 38 years with the agency. Hamnett supported the ban on chlorpyrifos and had a long track record of elevating public health impacts into her consideration of chemical harms, particularly on lead paint in homes. As she told the Times, science can rarely be 100 percent sure about anything but if a chemical is “likely to be a severe effect and result in a significant number of people exposed . . . I am going to err on the side of safety.”

With a White House that now errs on the side of industry, Hamnett told the Times that she resigned because, “I had become irrelevant.”

“You can’t let your windows up and enjoy a fresh breeze”

A Trump administration dedicated to making science and scientists irrelevant surely has worse in store for everyone else. Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services released a report revealing how low-income residents and people of color regardless of income are more likely to live near toxic chemical facilities in the Houston area.

One resident, 56-year-old Rosie Ann Porter, retired from a job supplying helicopter parts, told the Post that her daughter grew up with serious asthma. Other neighbors complained of other chronic lung diseases. Porter said, “You can’t let your windows up and enjoy a fresh breeze coming through the house. When they’re up and the refinery’s spilling out those fumes, it’s nothing nice.”

In a solid example of environmental justice reporting that displayed the agency of residents, the Post made it clear that the residents refused to succumb to the fumes without many fights. But victories were fleeting. A federal jury found Citgo guilty in 2007 of spewing benzine, a known carcinogen, into the community. The company was fined $2 million, but the verdict and fine were completely overturned on appeals, based on improper instructions to the jury. A report last year by the Department of Health and Human Services found higher rates of asthma and cancer in males than the Texas average.

Living in the shadows of soot

More recently, Hillcrest rose up against a massive proposed $500 million bridge spanning high above the Corpus Christi shipping channel. The bridge would allow supertankers to ply beneath it, but construction of the span and a highway addition would completely box in and isolate Hillcrest from any other neighborhood.

Citing civil rights laws and banking on support from an Obama administration sympathetic to the history of highway projects ripping apart communities of color, Porter and other Hillcrest residents filed a complaint with the Federal Highway Administration. The complaint resulted in an unusual compromise in 2015. Texas officials were so eager to increase commerce that they agreed to buyout residents at two or three times their average home value of around $50,000.

That victory came with some major asterisks. One is that the buyouts still may never fully compensate residents for home values that were depressed for decades because of the encroaching refineries. Another is that undocumented residents, whom the Obama administration assumed were eligible for buyouts under nondiscrimination laws, were cut out of the deal by Texas once the Trump administration took over with its anti-Latino immigrant animus. No one knows how many undocumented families are affected because a public complaint might result in deportation.

Thus one set of people, after decades of industrial abuse, are about to set off for other parts of Texas with a payout that may or may not help them buy new homes. Another set of people will continue to live fearfully in the shadows of soot. And in Washington, an administration continues to draw a shroud over all of environmental protections, working to the day that science and safety are, to borrow from Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, irrelevant.

The irony is particularly cruel because a draft copy of Pruitt’s repeal order says with a straight face that it complies with President Clinton’s 1994 environmental justice executive order protecting vulnerable populations. The order says it is “unlikely to have disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects on minority populations, low-income populations and/or indigenous peoples.” For further insult, the home page of EPA’s website has a banner at the bottom declaring that October is Children’s Health Month. “Children are often more likely at risk from environmental hazards,’ the banner read. “Find ways you can protect children from environmental risks.”

Pruitt is increasing the risks and making a mockery of the agency’s name in throwing out the CPP proposed by former President Obama to curb carbon emissions that harm both climate and health. Using Voodoo Economics 2.0, Pruitt claims repeal will save Americans $33 billion in needless industrial compliance.

The reality is that even without the CPP, which Pruitt helped hold up in the courts when he was attorney general of Oklahoma, renewable energy is a powerhouse that already dwarfs the supposed savings of CPP repeal. Its growth is being felt in red states, blue states, and purple states alike. Nationwide, the trade association Advanced Energy Economy estimates that the sectors of energy efficiency, solar and wind power add up to a $108 billion industry.

The $33 billion in total industrial savings boasted by Pruitt are obliterated by the annual benefits of up to $34 billion a year in better health from the cleaner air delivered by the CPP. The EPA projected 3,600 less premature deaths a year, along with 1,700 less heart attacks, 90,000 less asthma attacks and 300,000 less missed workdays and school days. An independent analysis two years ago by eight researchers, including scientists from Harvard, Syracuse and Boston universities published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found there would be about 3,500 fewer premature deaths with the cleaner air proposed by Obama. Their study concluded:

“Carbon standards to curb global climate change can also provide immediate local and regional health co-benefits.” The researchers found that in the scenario closest to the Clean Power Plan, most of the states with the highest health benefits are also those that burn the most coal to generate electricity. Some of those same researchers last year published a study on the financial benefits in the online science journal PLOS One. They found that the CPP would result in $38 billion in annual net health and social benefits. The study said, “The health co-benefits gained from air quality improvements associated with climate mitigation policies can be large, widespread, and occur nearly immediately once emissions reductions are realized.”

The health implications are so widespread it indeed constitutes an environmental justice issue. The Department of Health and Human Services says Latino children are 40 percent more likely to die from asthma attacks than white children. And among all racial groups, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African American children have the highest rate of asthma, one in six, and had the highest rise in asthma from 2001 to 2009, 50 percent.

The benefits are also economic for the parents of these children. For instance, Latino workers are particularly vulnerable to the hotter temperatures of climate change as, according to the Department of Labor, they constitute 42 percent of construction laborers up to 75 percent of farm field workers.

But make no mistake, Pruitt’s repeal has the potential to hurt everyone. In response to Pruitt’s repeal of the CPP, an editorial Tuesday in the Portland Press Herald, a leading newspaper in the very white state of Maine, said, “Maine children have some of the highest rates of asthma in the nation, partly as a result of our position downwind from the power plants in the Midwest and Great Lakes states, putting young lungs at the end of the nation’s tailpipe.”

Unfortunately, this is hardly the first decision Pruitt has made in his first half year running the EPA that puts children in harm’s way. He has reversed the ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide known to be associated with reduced brain function in children. He is reviewing or pledging to reverse other Obama-era rules designed to curb water pollution and toxic chemical spills.

In his press release Tuesday, Pruitt claimed he was “reinstating transparency into how we protect our environment.” All he actually did was clarify his role as a puppet of fossil fuel, at the utter expense of the health of the nation’s children. When the Obama administration proposed the Clean Power Plan, the health benefits to children were at its center.

The word “children” is not uttered once in Pruitt’s official announcement of repeal.

Puffins were nearly extinct in Maine in the early 1900s, hunted for their eggs and meat. Their re-introduction to Eastern Egg Rock in Maine in the 1970s became the world's first successful restoration of a seabird to an island where humans killed it off.Photo: Derrick Jackson

Eastern Egg Rock, Maine — Under bejeweled blackness, the lacy string of the Milky Way was gloriously sliced by the International Space Station, the brightest object in the sky. Matthew Dickey, a 21-year-old wildlife and fisheries senior at Texas A&M, grabbed a powerful bird scope and was able to find the space station before it went over the horizon. He shouted: “I think I can make out the shape of the cylinder!”

The space station gone, Dickey and four other young bird researchers settled back down around a campfire fueled with wood from old bird blinds that had been blown out of their misery by a recent storm.

They were alone six miles out to sea on a treeless six-acre jumble of boulders and bramble.

44 years of Project Puffin

On this seemingly inconspicuous speck in Maine waters, a man once as young as they were, Steve Kress, began restoring puffins. He was part of the world’s first successful effort to restore a seabird to an island where they had been killed off by human activity. The experiment began in the spring of 1973 by bringing down 10-day-old chicks down from Newfoundland, feeding them until fledging size in the fall, and hoping that after two or three years out at sea, they would remember Maine and not the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve in Canada, where decades of management have maintained Canada’s largest puffin colony of more than 260,000 pairs.

Tonight it was a celebratory fire, flickering off faces with crescent smiles. Besides Dickey, there was team supervisor Laura Brazier, a 26-year-old science and biology graduate of Loyola University in Maryland and masters degree graduate in wildlife conservation at the University of Dublin in Ireland. There was Alyssa Eby, 24, an environmental biology graduate of the University of Manitoba; Jessie Tutterow, 31, a biology graduate of Guilford College; and Alicia Aztorga-Ornelas, 29, a biology graduate from the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, Mexico.

In the two days prior, their routine count of burrows with breeding pairs of puffins surpassed the all-time record. The previous mark was 150, set last year. During my four-night stay with them in late July, the count rose from 147 to 157. The summer would end with 172 pairs.

“We did it. We are awesome. You guys are awesome,” Brazier said. “Puffins are cool enough. To know we set a new record and we’re part of puffin history is incredible.”

As the fire roared on, celebration became contemplation. As full of themselves as they had a right to be, they know their record is fragile. Where once there were no more than four puffins left in Maine in 1902, decimated by coastal dwellers for eggs and meat, Kress and 600 interns in the 44 years of Project Puffin have nursed the numbers back to 1,300 pairs on three islands. The techniques used in the project—including the translocation of chicks and the use of decoys, mirrors, and broadcast bird sounds to make birds think they had company—have helped save 64 species of birds in 14 countries, including Japan and China. (I have the distinct pleasure of being Kress’s co-author on the story of his quest, “Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock,” published in 2015 by Yale University Press.)

Interns (Left to right) Alyssa Eby, Matthew Dickey, Alicia Aztorga-Ornelas, and Eastern Egg Rock Supervisor Laura Brazier hold an adult puffin they banded. Also on the team but not pictured is Jessie Tutterow.

For puffins, there already is significant evidence that in the warmest years, the puffin’s preferred cold-water prey like herring and hake are forced farther out to sea while some of the fish that come up from the mid-Atlantic, such as butterfish, are too big and oval for small puffin chicks to eat. The new fish volatility is such that while puffins thrived last year on tiny Eastern Egg Rock, their counterparts could not find fish off the biggest puffin island in the Gulf of Maine, Canadian-administered Machias Seal Island. Last year saw a record-low near-total breeding failure among its 5,500 pairs of puffins.

The Atlantic puffin, from Maine to the United Kingdom, has rapidly become a signal bird for climate change via the fish the parents attempt to bring to chicks. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming waters in the world and as a result, more puffins are bringing in more southerly species such as butterfish, such as the one pictured here. Butterfish are too large and oval for chicks to eat, leading to starvation. Photo: Derrick Jackson

In the European part of the Atlantic puffin’s range, warmer water displacing prey, overfishing, and pollution have hammered breeding success. According to an article this year in the journal Conservation Letters, co-authored by Andy Rosenberg, the director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former regional fisheries director for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the north Atlantic realm of the puffin is one of the most over-exploited fisheries in the world, as evident by the crash of several fisheries, most notably cod.

On the Norwegian island of Rost for instance, the 1.5 million breeding pairs of puffins of four decades ago were down to 289,000 in 2015. A key reason appears to be voracious mackerel moving northward, gobbling up the puffin’s herring. Even though there are an estimated 9.5 million to 11.6 million puffins on the other side of the Atlantic for now, Bird Life International two years ago raised the extinction threat for puffins from “least concern” to “vulnerable.”

Much of that was on the minds of the Egg Rock interns, because the very puffins they were counting are in the crosshairs of American politics.

Incessant attacks on environmental accomplishments

Puffins are on land only four months to breed so Kress and his team a few years ago put geo-locators on some birds to see where they migrate in the eight months at sea. Two years ago, the team announced that in the fall and early winter, many Maine puffins go north to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. In late winter and early spring, they come south to forage in fish-rich deep water far south of Cape Cod. That area of ocean is so relatively untouched by human plunder, the corals in the deep are as colorful as any in a Caribbean reef.

The Obama administration was impressed enough to designate the area as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument, protected from commercial exploitation. While vast areas of the Pacific Ocean under US jurisdiction earned monument status under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, the canyons are the first US waters in the Atlantic to be so protected.

The researchers on Egg Rock mused around the fire over the concerted attempt, led by the Republican Party and often aided by Democrats in top fossil-fuel production states, to roll back environmental protections for everything from coral to coal ash and broadly discredit science in everything from seabird protections to renewable energy. Some of the divisions of NOAA that are directly involved in studying waters like the Gulf of Maine are targeted for massive budget cuts by the Trump administration.

Maine’s puffins are direct beneficiaries of strict federal fishing management since the 1970s. In recent years, puffins have supplemented their traditional diet of herring and hake with species that have rebounded in the Gulf of Maine, such as the haddock pictured here. Photo: Derrick Jackson

Fighting against a stacked deck

“It’s funny how in the business world and the stock market, no one questions the numbers and facts,” said Brazier, who marched in April’s March for Science in Washington, DC. “They’re taken as facts and then people use them to decide what to do. But now it’s ok to question science.”

“I think it’s because if you can deny science, you can deny what needs to be done,” Eby said. “It’s too hard for a lot of people in rich countries to get their heads around the fact is that if we’re going to deal with climate change, we’re going to have to change the way we live and the way we use energy. That’s so hard, a lot of people would rather find ways to skip the science and live in their world without thinking about the consequences.”

Tutterow, who hails from North Carolina, where the General Assembly in 2012 famously banned state use of a 100-year-projection of a 39-inch sea-level rise, added, “If I was offered a state or federal job, I’d take it. I’d like to believe there’s a lot of career professionals who work hard to get the job done. But it used to be the main thing you worried about was red tape. Now you have to worry about censorship.”

Dickey said simply, “Sometimes it feels like the deck is stacked against us. But we just have to keep working as hard as we can until someone realizes we’re just trying to deliver facts to help the world.”

Puffins in Maine breed in burrows that wind crazily underneath boulders that rim their islands. That tests the ability of interns to reach for chicks to band for future study. Photo: Derrick Jackson

Joyful doggedness

The stacked deck is unfair, given the joyful doggedness displayed by this crew. On two days, I followed them around the perimeters of Egg Rock as they wrenched their bodies to “grub” under the boulders, contorting until they could reach their arm into the darkness to puffin chicks to band for research.

The simple act of banding has led to understanding the puffin’s extremely high levels of fidelity, coming back to the same island and burrow year after year despite migrating hundreds of miles away. One Project Puffin bird was in the running for the oldest-known puffin in the world, making it to 35 before disappearing in 2013. A Norwegian puffin made it 41 before being found dead.

On other Atlantic puffin islands, the birds can nest in more shallow cavities of rocks and mounds in grassy cliffs within wrist and elbow reach. Researchers on those islands are able to band scores of puffin chicks and adults.

But the massive size of jagged boulders on Eastern Egg Rock makes it so difficult to grub that the summer record was only 14. On my visit, the crew went from 9 to 17 chicks, with Brazier constantly saying, “Oh no, we’re not giving up. We got this. The next crew’s going to have work hard to beat us.”

No face was brighter than Aztorga-Ornelas’ when she took an adult puffin they banded and lowered it between her legs like a basketball player making an underhanded free throw. She lifted up the bird and let it go to fly back to the ocean to get more fish for its chicks. “I’ll never forget that for the rest of my life,” she said.

On another day, with the same enthusiasm displayed for puffins, they grubbed for another member of the auk family, the black guillemot. At one point, they caught four chicks in separate burrows within seconds of each other. They gleefully posed with birds for photographs.

“I wish people could feel why I’m in this,” Tutterow said. She talked about a prior wolf study project in Minnesota. “We tracked in the snow what we thought was one wolf,” she said. “Then, at a junction, what we thought was one single wolf, the tracks split into five different sets of tracks. Your jaw drops at the ability of these animals to perfectly follow each other to disguise the pack.”

Eastern Egg Rock went from the 1880s to 1981 with no breeding puffins. This year, the number of breeding pairs hit a record 172. Where there were two or four birds left in the entire state of Maine in 1902, there are 1,300 pair today. Photo: Derrick Jackson

Getting it right

My jaw dropped at how bird science is making world travelers out of this crew beyond Egg Rock. Brazier has worked with African penguins in South Africa, loggerhead turtles in Greece, snowshoe hares in the Yukon, and this fall is headed to Midway Atoll for habitat restoration in key grounds for albatross.

Eby has worked with foxes in Churchill, Manitoba; oystercatchers, murres, auklets, gulls, and petrels in Alaska; and ducks in Nebraska. Besides wolves, Tutterow has helped manage tropicbirds and shearwaters in the Bahamas, honeybees and freshwater fish in North Carolina, loons in the Adirondacks, and wolves in Minnesota. Aztorga-Ornelas has worked with oystercatchers and auklets on Mexican islands and Dickey has helped restore bobwhite, quail, deer, and wild turkey habitat in Texas.

Brazier said a huge reason she helped rehabilitate injured endangered African penguins in South Africa was because of her experience tending to them in college at the Maryland Zoo. “I actually didn’t get the section of the zoo I applied for,” she said. “I got the African penguin exhibit and when all these little fellas were running around my feet, it was the best day of my life.”

Though he is the youngest of the crew, Dickey said his quail and bobwhite work gave him self-sufficiency beyond his years. “My boss lived two miles away and my tractor had a flat four times. It was on me to fix it and I figured it out, even though it was hotter than hell every day, sometimes 110.”

Tutterow, the oldest, originally earned a bachelors degree in nursing at Appalachian State University, but found far more satisfaction in an outdoor career. Among her fondest childhood memories was her parents allowing her to wander in local woods to read atop a rock on a creek. “You can build a lifestyle around any amount of income, but you cannot build happiness into every lifestyle,” she said. “Working with these animals, I’m building happiness for them and me.”

No myopic set of politics and denial of science should ever get in the way of this level of career happiness. Aztorga-Ornelas and I, despite her limited English and my stunted Spanish, shared a dozen “Wows!” sitting together in a bird blind, watching puffins zoom ashore with fish.

Eby said, “It’s strange for me. We just came out of a conservative government in Canada (under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper) where they stopped lake research for acid rain, fisheries, and climate change and government scientists did not feel the freedom to speak out. And now that we’re getting more freedom, I’m here. I hope the US can get it right soon.”

If any set of Republicans cracks the party’s wall of denial on climate change, it will be those most responsible to deal with its ravages—mayors. That was reaffirmed during Hurricane Irma when Miami’s Republican mayor, Tomas Regalado, told the Miami Herald:

“This is the time to talk about climate change. This is the time that the president and the EPA and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change. If this isn’t climate change, I don’t know what is. This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come.”

Irma offered Regalado a crescendo for a message he and other Republican mayors in Florida have repeatedly sent to party leaders. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, he and fellow Republican James Cason, who this year retired as mayor of Coral Gables, penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald challenging Republican candidates to understand that the rising seas of climate change will make South Florida “unrecognizable.”

Describing themselves as “staunch” Republicans who otherwise are suspicious of federal regulations, Regalado and Cason wrote that “we shouldn’t waste time” debating the science. Rather, they said it was time to debate how to respond.

“We can debate ways to develop clean energy, how to put a price on carbon and how to protect coastline communities from flooding and storms,” they wrote. “We can debate ways to grow the economy and create new jobs while protecting lives and property from climate change.”

In an interview last year with National Public Radio, Cason said climate change affects everything from low-lying schools and hospitals to the owners of $5 million homes who “see their property values go down because they can no longer get a boat out. When they start flooding, whenever that is, when do they stop paying taxes?”

Republican mayors do not have the luxury to fly at the 30,000-foot level of denial as Florida Governor Rick Scott is accused of banning “climate change” from official state communications, as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt claims it is “insensitive” to connect climate change to Hurricane Irma, and as Arizona Senator John McCain made news by being a lonely Republican calling merely for “common-sense measures” on climate change.

Rather, Republican mayors say they fret along with their coastal Democratic counterparts about chronic high-tide inundation and the rising intensity and restoration costs of storms.

In Coral Gables, the new mayor, Republican Raul Valdes-Fauli, is a former tax attorney for oil companies. During his campaign, he said climate change “is not just a feel-good issue, it is a very vital issue for Coral Gables.”

In Palm Beach County, Steve Abrams, a Republican who was mayor and is currently a commissioner, last year told the British Guardian newspaper, “We don’t have the luxury at the local level to engage in these lofty policy debates. I have been in knee-deep water in many parts of my district during King Tide.”

In other parts of the nation far from hurricane zones, other Republican mayors have begun to speak out. Carmel, Indiana Mayor James Brainard vociferously opposed President Trump’s pullout of the Paris climate agreements. In June, he told National Public Radio that the Midwest is “at risk for all sorts of bad things,” particularly “the frequency and intensity of storms” and “the evolution of new pests in the fields outside our metro areas.”

Brainard said his city is taking many steps to fight climate change, by making the city more walkable, switching street lights to LEDs, adding parkland, and ordering all fleet vehicles to be either hybrids or use alternative fuel. He said that on a one-on-one basis at least, he stops critics of green investment in their tracks with the city’s dramatically lower electricity costs.

He told NPR that by ignoring the economic benefits of going green, the Trump administration has “missed a political opportunity to expand their base. They’re speaking to a very small portion of the Republican base, and it’s a big missed opportunity for them.”

And in America’s largest city to be governed by a Republican mayor, San Diego’s Kevin Faulconer continues to set the pace for many of his Democratic big-city counterparts with his city’s plan for all-renewable energy by 2035. Despite some local criticism that his administration is not working fast enough on bike lines, tree canopies, and giving communities more say in where their electricity comes from, Faulconer remains a standard bearer for Republicans who see that wildfires and rising seas are tied to fossil fuels. Last month, he told the prestigious Commonwealth Club in San Francisco:

“It’s time for today’s California Republicans to stop ignoring climate change. If we opt out of the conversation, we’re only going to get extreme one-party solutions. We should be proud to offer our own plans to preserve our environment—plans that don’t plunder the middle class.”

The Republican Party may not yet be proud of the likes of Faulconer and Regalado. But based on the battering over the last decade and a half of the East Coast and Gulf Coast by hurricanes, the blistering heat of the West, the increasing intensity of storms in the Midwest, and the northward spread of crop pests and diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks, the party does not have long to opt in to the conversation.

Red knots on Cape May: The population of the rufa subspecies of red knot has declined by an estimated 75 percent over the past two decades as sea level rise, shoreline stabilization, and Arctic warming shrink its habitat.

On a sunny spring day, David La Puma, the director of the Cape May Bird Observatory, escorted 20 birders to a phenomenal site in the world of migrating birds. Scores of laughing gulls crowded at the shoreline at Reed’s. Not a speck of sand could be seen beneath them. Flittering around them, sneaking through whatever airspace they could find, were some of the prettiest of shorebirds, known for their robin-orange heads and breasts: red knots.

Despite the crowded shores, La Puma is concerned: this is nowhere close to the number of birds historically observed in this renowned migratory rest stop. This drop in population may spell trouble not only for the area’s biodiversity but also for its economy, as tourists from around the world come to Cape May to witness the bird migrations.

In 2014, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) listed the rufa subspecies of the red knot as threatened. Its numbers have declined by an estimated 75 percent over the last two decades to around 25,000 birds. The FWS reports that causes include “loss of habitat across its range due to sea level rise, shoreline stabilization, and Arctic warming.”

New analysis by UCS suggests that we may be in only the beginning stages of that habitat loss. Given a moderate scenario for sea level rise, many Cape May coastal communities could see 15 percent or more of their land flooded 26 times or more per year, or every other week, on average, by the middle of the century.

If emissions continue to rise through the end of the century, sea level is projected to rise more than 6 feet by 2100. In this scenario, the same areas of Cape May that were flooded by Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge would be inundated more than 26 times or more per year, or every other week on average. When Rising Seas Hit Home, 2017

“They’ll lose their beaches”

The birders watched as the red knots jostled each other, moving backwards in unison as waves came in, to peck at what the casual observer would assume was an ordinary strip of wrack pushed ashore. For the birds, the seaweed was the tablecloth for their version of a Michelin-starred meal; trapped inside the clumps were fatty horseshoe crab eggs.

Somewhere along evolution’s path, red knots coevolved with the egg-laying cycle of the horseshoe crab. One female crab can lay 100,000 eggs in the sand over the course of a few days, and many end up in the wrack. The birds on the beach in Cape May had arrived from thousands of miles away in South America, utterly spent of fat. Stocking up on the eggs allows them to regain their migrating weight and to continue on to the Arctic.

A red knot among a flock of laughing gulls.

“The red knot is the poster bird, but a whole host of birds will probably lose habitat. They’ll lose their beaches, they’ll be squeezed out of areas between low marsh and high marsh, there’ll be changes in water salinity, you could go on,” La Puma said. Among the birds he fears will be sensitive to sea level rise are various species of sparrows, rails, owls, terns, and other shorebirds, including the threatened piping plover.

An obvious way to help would be to preserve Cape May’s thousands of acres of natural habitat. That is a prime mission of the Wetlands Institute in the town of Stone Harbor. After Hurricane Sandy severely eroded beaches where horseshoe crabs lay eggs, the institute was a key partner in restoring critical spawning beaches in time for the next red knot migration.

It is involved in several conservation efforts working to understand the best ways to preserve coastal resiliency and implementing projects to offset the effects of sea level rise on area wildlife, including horseshoe crabs, diamondback terrapins, and coastal birds. It also offers several education programs to promote marsh advocacy.

Protecting homes and habitats

Charles Krafczek, a member of the Stone Harbor Borough Council, and Lenore Tedesco, Executive Director of the Wetlands Institute, Cape May, NJ.

Executive Director Lenore Tedesco hopes that whatever measures the Cape May region takes to prepare for sea level rise—including fortifying the wetlands as a natural sponge and barrier—are done in a way that does no harm.

In many other resort communities around the country, a reflexive solution for rising seas and storm surges is to build waterfront homes higher, strengthen bulkheads at their foundations, and build higher seawalls.

With many Cape May communities facing chronic inundation within the next several decades, one can imagine wanting to take the same approach here. According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of Georgia and Stetson University, Cape May County could see 38,000 families displaced this century by a three-foot sea level rise and nearly 80,000 by a six-foot rise.

But more than half of Cape May County is protected open space, and Tedesco believes that open space holds much potential to protect both homeowners and wildlife.

“The country, not just Cape May, has to start asking a lot of fundamental questions,” Tedesco said. “How much can we keep ‘renourishing’ our beaches? How much can we anchor the beach for homes? Even though our wetlands are largely protected, sea level rise will likely chip away at them. As we continue to work to understand how local area marshes are responding to sea level rise, we need to work together to protect them while seeking community-wide solutions that work for both people and wildlife.”

La Puma hopes those solutions come soon, as there is no telling exactly when sea level rise will begin to cause a fatal disruption of migration patterns and food supplies for the birds. “The most alarming thing to me is that people might be looking for an obvious signal of what is happening with the birds, but it might be subtler than that year to year,” he said. “By the time we discover the damage, it’s hard to say if we can recover.”

Looking out over the vast marshy wetlands that stood between them and the Manhattan skyline shimmering in the background, Hugh Carola and Michele Langa of the conservation society Hackensack Riverkeeper called the Meadowlands the salvation for several cities and towns in New Jersey during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.

“A buffer that literally means life and death”

On a driving tour to various shoreline spots, Langa, an attorney for the group, pointed back to two homes that still showed subtle water stains from the crest of Sandy’s floodwaters. “This is where the marsh saved this area,” she said. “The violence of Sandy’s water was absorbed by the marsh and rose slowly against the houses. If they had been hit by the same surge as the outer boroughs of New York and the Jersey Shore, they would have been gone.”

“It could have been so much worse,” said Carola, the Riverkeeper’s program director. “The wetlands are a buffer that literally means life and death.”

Michele Langa and Hugh Carola of Hackensack Riverkeeper are working to protect the wetlands, which covered 21,000 acres before World War II. Only 7,000 acres remain today.

A new challenge dawns

It is obvious what has to be done to continue to protect this area: preserve the 7,000 acres of wetlands that remain of the 21,000 acres the region had before World War II and the 14,000 acres it had as late as the 1990s. Most people know the area for the giant Meadowlands stadium complex, which plays host to the New York Giants and New York Jets professional football teams; the adjacent wetlands are a powerhouse of different sort.

The preservation efforts of groups such as Hackensack Riverkeeper have kept the remaining marsh off-limits to development, with many benefits. Despite high levels of mercury and other heavy metals left behind by industrial activity that have some advocates wanting the area declared a Superfund site, the clean up efforts to date have allowed a rich array of wildlife to return to the watershed. One bald eagle pair recently fledged three chicks. Owls and osprey hunt, butterflies flutter, and a rare calliope hummingbird was spotted and photographed in a yard in Secaucus.

Black Skimmers in Hackensack.

To emphasize his point, Carola drove to a boat dock where there was a flock of black skimmers, a tern-like black and white bird with a striking red and black beak. It is listed as endangered in New Jersey. “Last year we had thousands of people kayaking and riding pontoons and had 1,000 people participating in river cleanups, from pre-K to senior citizens,” Carola said. “We had garden clubs, church groups, school groups. We think people are getting the message that the flowing waters of our nation belong to everybody.”

That message is getting through just as a new challenge dawns on the region in the form of rising seas caused by climate change. The area has begun to experience more flooding at the highest tides. “I talk to senior citizens a lot and they tell me about times that streams rose slowly during rains,” Carola said. “Now, rains bring them right up to flood stage.”

If emissions continue to rise through the end of the century, sea level is projected to rise more than 6 feet by 2100. In this scenario, the same areas of northern New Jersey and New York City that were flooded by Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge would be inundated more than 26 times or more per year, or every other week on average. When Rising Seas Hit Home, 2017.

Those with the least resources to cope get hit the hardest

Just as concerned as Carola about high-tide flooding is Hernan Lopez, the emergency management coordinator for Carlstadt, New Jersey. With some of its borders abutting the Meadowlands stadium complex, the borough is one of the most important towns in the New York metropolitan area that few have heard of, according to Lopez. It has 6,000 residents and 40,000 daytime workers in a wide range of industries, from chemicals to computer backup, from apparel to glassmaking.

When Sandy blew through, Lopez said the town lost a lot of trucks and equipment and the ensuing water damage temporarily shuttered about 100 businesses, affecting 5,000 jobs. On a driving tour, he pointed out the side of a produce distributor. “There were fish everywhere,” Lopez said. “It stunk for weeks.”

Many of the bigger and more financially stable businesses are back, some raising their foundations three feet and generators six feet. But several mom-and-pop operations closed for good, highlighting a common theme when disaster strikes: those with the least resources to cope get hit the hardest.

On the driving tour, Lopez pointed out the site of an apparel company owned by immigrants. Their boxes of clothes had been stored outside at ground level, and the company was ruined during Sandy, when there wasn’t enough room or time to get them inside.

“I talk to senior citizens a lot and they tell me about [past] times that streams rose slowly during rains,” Carola said. “Now, rains bring them right up to flood stage.” Tidal flooding in Carlstadt.

Lopez said he notices on an anecdotal level that water lingers longer in the streets after heavy rains. A new tidal gate was christened in 2014, but Lopez said it takes more than a gate to hold back the water. He drove to a location where the backyard of several businesses is the marsh.

“One concern of mine is with the water getting higher, it makes it more important to stop illegal dumping in our marshes and waterways,” he said. “The debris clogs the drains and makes the water build up.”

Because of Sandy, the federal government awarded the Meadowlands area a $150 million grant to devise plans to reduce the risk of floods and improve storm-water drainage. There are several proposals currently being debated, including one to attempt to wall out the water. Groups such as Hackensack Riverkeeper are lobbying for solutions that focus on making the wetlands more resilient than resistant by improving the drainage ability of the wetlands and increasing open space and green infrastructure.

While the region’s uniformly low elevation presents a major long-term challenge in the face of sea level rise, having more open space could be critical to the future health of the wetlands. Wetlands that have the space to migrate may keep pace with sea level rise rather than be drowned by rising waters.

“We’re totally focused on natural ways to deal with the future,” Carola. “It was nature that saved us from the worst effects of Sandy.”